River of The Dead Read online

  Copyright © 2009 Barbara Nadel

  The right of Barbara Nadel to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2011

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN: 978 0 7553 7894 4

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Praise for Barbara Nadel

  Dedication

  Cast of Characters

  Prelude

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Acknowledgements

  Turkish Alphabet

  Footnotes

  About the Author

  Trained as an actress, Barbara Nadel used to work in mental health services. Born in the East End of London, she now writes full time and has been a regular visitor to Turkey for over twenty years. She received the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger for her novel Deadly Web in 2005. She is also the author of the highly acclaimed Francis Hancock series set during World War Two.

  Praise for Barbara Nadel:

  ‘The delight of Nadel’s books is the sense of being taken beneath the surface of an ancient city which most visitors see for a few days at most. We look into the alleyways and curious dark quarters of Istanbul, full of complex characters and louche atmosphere’

  Independent

  ‘A colourful and persuasive portrait of contemporary Istanbul’

  Literary Review

  ‘Nadel’s novels take in all of Istanbul – the mysterious, the beautiful, the hidden and the banal. Her characters are vivid. A fascinating view of contemporary Turkey’

  Scotland on Sunday

  ‘Nadel’s evocation of the shady underbelly of modern Turkey is one of the perennial joys of crime fiction’

  Mail on Sunday

  ‘Nadel makes full use of the rich variety of possibilities offered by modern Istanbul and its inhabitants. Crime fiction can do many things, and here it offers both a well crafted mystery and a form of armchair tourism, with Nadel as an expert guide’

  Spectator

  ‘The strands of Barbara Nadel’s novel are woven as deftly as the carpet at the centre of the tale . . . a wonderful setting . . . a dizzying ride’

  Guardian

  To Alex, Pat and Lisa - fellow travellers

  on the road to the east.

  Cast of Characters

  * * *

  İstanbul

  Çetin İkmen – İstanbul police inspector

  Mehmet Süleyman – İstanbul police inspector – İkmen’s protégé

  Commissioner Ardıç – İkmen’s and Suleyman’s boss

  Sergeant Ayşe Farsakoğlu – İkmen’s deputy

  Sergeant İzzet Melik – Süleyman’s deputy

  Dr Arto Sarkissian – İstanbul police pathologist

  Fatma İkmen – Çetin İkmen’s wife

  Zelfa Süleyman – Mehmet Süleyman’s wife

  Çiçek İkmen – Çetin İkmen’s daughter

  Bekir İkmen – Çetin İkmen’s son

  Kemal İkmen – Çetin İkmen’s son

  Bülent İkmen – Çetin İkmen’s son

  Yusuf Kaya – escaped prisoner

  Ramazan Eren – prison guard

  Cengiz Bayar – prison guard

  Ara Berköz – prisoner

  Mr Aktar – hospital administrator

  Dr Eldem – neurologist

  İsak Mardin – nurse

  Murat Lole – nurse

  Faruk Öz – nurse

  Sophia – Bulgarian girl, a beggar

  In the east

  Inspector Edibe Taner – Mardin police inspector

  Captain Hilmi Erdur – of the Birecik Jandarma

  Seçkin Taner – Edibe Taner’s father

  Seraphim Yunun – a Syrian monk

  Gabriel Saatçi – a Syrian monk

  Musa Saatçi – Gabriel Saatçi’s father

  Zeynep Kaya – Yusuf Kaya’s wife

  Bulbul Kaplan – Yusuf Kaya’s aunt

  Anastasia Akyuz – a prostitute

  Elizabeth Smith – an American

  İbrahim Keser – works for Elizabeth Smith

  Lütfü Güneş – a Kurd

  Lucine Rezian – elderly Armenian woman

  Prelude

  * * *

  ‘I’m going to be sick!’

  The figure in the wheelchair slumped forward as if to emphasise the point. Prison guard Ramazan Eren, who was pushing the chair, said, ‘Hang on, Yusuf, we’re nearly there.’

  ‘You should have cuffed him,’ police constable Mete said angrily.

  ‘He’s having a heart attack!’ Eren responded sharply.

  There were four men with the individual in the wheelchair – two police constables and two prison guards. The man in the chair, their charge, was Yusuf Kaya: drug dealer, murderer and one of İstanbul’s most notorious criminals. Late the previous evening, back in his cell at Kartal High Security Prison, he had started experiencing chest pains. The prison doctor had been called and had found little to concern him. But then in the early hours of the morning Kaya’s condition had seemed to deteriorate. The prison governor ordered Ramazan Eren, the guard who had first reported Kaya’s illness, and a colleague, Cengiz Bayar, to take the prisoner to the Cerrahpaşa Hospital for further tests and possibly treatment. There they had been joined by two police officers. Yusuf Kaya was known to be a very violent offender and, sick or not, no chances were being taken.

  The officers had just rounded the corner on their way to the cardiology clinic when Yusuf Kaya began to complain of feelings of nausea. Up ahead was a group of young men, a couple of whom appeared, to Cengiz Bayar, to be in uniform.

  ‘Look, Yusuf, there are some nurses,’ he said. ‘We’ll get them to find you a bowl or something.’

  He called out to the men, four in all, who began walking towards the officers and their wheelchair-bound charge.

  ‘We’re taking this man to cardiology,’ Cengiz Bayar said as the group drew level with them. ‘Could you—’

  But the pain from the knife or whatever it was that one of the men thrust into his chest was so awful it took his power of speech clean away. One of the police officers began to shout, but Yusuf Kaya soon put a stop to him. Miraculously well again, he leapt up from the wheelchair, took some
thing sharp from the hand of one of the unknown men and killed the policeman stone dead.

  The last two things prison officer Cengiz Bayar saw in this world were his colleagues collapsing around him in fountains of blood and a very fit Yusuf Kaya running off to freedom down the hospital corridor.

  ‘Who are you?’ Kemal İkmen asked.

  ‘Who are you?’ the man with the thick gold chains round his neck replied. There was something aggressive in the man’s approach that Kemal, for all his teenage bravado, didn’t like. There was also, more strangely, something about him that was vaguely familiar too.

  ‘Listen, son, does Inspector Çetin İkmen live here or not?’ the man continued gruffly. ‘If he does, I’d like to see him, and if he doesn’t—’

  ‘Yeah, but who wants to know?’ Kemal interrupted. The boy’s father, Çetin İkmen, was a high-ranking and successful officer in the İstanbul police force. He therefore had a lot of enemies as well as some very odd and unnerving relatives who, like Çetin İkmen’s late mother, came originally from Albania. It was well known that some Albanian gang members could be very ‘flash’, just like this gold-covered creature at the apartment door.

  ‘You’re beginning to get on my nerves, boy!’ the man said.

  Kemal, for all his bluster, felt his face go cold with fear.

  ‘Does Inspector İkmen live here or not?’

  If this man was a relative he was, if Kemal were honest with himself, really out of character. The Albanian relatives were weird – one of them even dressed up as a woman – but they weren’t exactly frightening, not like this man. Cold sweat invaded the underside of Kemal’s shirt collar. Almost unconsciously he said, ‘Dad?’

  But his father didn’t appear. Instead it was his mother’s voice that came from inside the apartment.

  ‘Kemal, who is it?’ Fatma İkmen said.

  The man in front of him blinked as if reacting to something irritating around his eyes, and nervously licked his lips.

  ‘It’s a . . .’ Kemal began, but then his words simply faded in his throat. ‘It’s . . .’

  ‘Oh, for the love of . . .’ The sound of a woman grunting somewhat painfully to her feet was followed by the shuffling of slippers across carpet. Fatma İkmen, her head covered with a floral scarf, burst out of the living room into the hallway behind her youngest and, she often thought, silliest child Kemal. How difficult was it to answer a door? She pushed Kemal roughly out of the way, and then she stopped.

  Kemal, who could only see the strange man’s face from where he was standing, frowned when he saw this person give his mother what he felt was a very familiar smile. His mother in response said only, ‘No!’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ the man said as he opened his arms in front of her. ‘Oh yes it is!’

  ‘I can’t . . .’

  ‘Mum, it’s me, Bekir!’ the man said.

  ‘It is? It is!’ Fatma İkmen threw her short, plump body into the arms of someone Kemal had always thought of as almost a myth. Bekir, his bad boy rebellious brother, had run away from home when he was fifteen. Kemal hadn’t even been born then. And until this moment not a word had been heard nor hair been sighted of him since. His father, Çetin İkmen, who had followed the boy’s mother out of the living room and was now standing beside Kemal with a smouldering cigarette between his lips, had privately believed that his third son had died some years before. While Fatma cried copiously into the arms of her long-lost child, Çetin didn’t move from his position at all. He just looked. And when the man Kemal now knew was his brother smiled at their father, the youngster noticed that Çetin İkmen did not smile back. In fact, if anything, Inspector İkmen looked appalled about the appearance of this ghost from the past.

  Chapter 1

  * * *

  Every police officer in the city of İstanbul spent almost every waking moment looking for the escaped convict Yusuf Kaya. For three days and nights the entire city, or so it seemed to its residents, was turned upside down. Every bar, every nightclub, every bathhouse – anywhere Kaya might have had a market for his cocaine and his heroin – was raided. Every one of his old neighbours in his home district of Tarlabaşı was questioned. Those not drifting into or out of a heroin-induced haze claimed to know nothing about him. Those drugged up to the eyes didn’t know what year it was. But the investigating officer, Inspector Mehmet Süleyman, knew Tarlabaşı of old. Yusuf Kaya had in fact been arrested by the handsome and urbane Süleyman the previous summer. On what had probably been the hottest day in that July, Süleyman and his men had raided Kaya’s crumbling fifth-floor apartment and found a considerable quantity of heroin and two dead bodies. One was Kaya’s mistress, a Syrian prostitute called Hana; the other was a rival drug dealer, a Russian called Tommi Kerensky.

  When Süleyman and his men raided the apartment, Hana had been dead for some days. But as the inspector’s informant had intimated, Tommi had been tortured for many hours and had only just died when the police arrived. Kaya, calmly as was his wont, was sawing one of the Russian’s legs off when he was arrested. That someone so dangerous – ‘psychopathic’, the psychiatrist who had assessed him after his arrest had said – was free once again was a frightening thought. And while his colleague Çetin İkmen worked on trying to determine from the Cerrahpaşa Hospital just who those nurses and cleaners who freed Kaya might have been, it was up to Süleyman to find out whether the prisoner had been or was back home.

  Less than a week after the arrest, Kaya’s landlord had rented his apartment out to another man. Adem Ceylan was a known heroin user who was a familiar sight in rougher parts of the city like Tarlabaşı. For years he’d been living, on and off, with a German woman called Regina who was also a junkie, known to the police as a very persistent beggar in the main Beyoğlu shopping area of İstiklal Street. Filthy and screaming with hatred for just about everyone and everything, Regina could terrify even quite large groups of tourists into giving her money.

  Adem let the tall inspector and his shorter, fatter sergeant İzzet Melik into what passed for his sitting room and then, breathlessly, sat down.

  ‘Those stairs don’t get any easier!’ he said as he coughed on a soggy hand-rolled cigarette.

  Süleyman looked around, unsurprised that the place looked almost identical to what he’d seen of it the previous year. Even the chairs and tables were Kaya’s. But then junkies were not the best housekeepers going and he was simply relieved that his officers had cleaned up Tommi’s blood before they left. Both Süleyman and Melik declined the foul seats that Adem offered them.

  ‘You know of course about Yusuf Kaya,’ Süleyman said without preamble.

  Adem nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I was a bit frightened that he might come back here. Went to see my landlord as it happens, I was so worried. Not for myself, you understand, but with Regina . . .’

  It was hard to reconcile the image of the spitting, cursing Regina with someone who needed to be protected, but both Süleyman and Melik nodded anyway.

  ‘What did your landlord tell you?’ Süleyman asked.

  He had already spoken to Kaya’s old landlord himself. That too hadn’t been a comfortable experience. The landlord, though not a drug user or even a drinker, was a man unaccustomed to personal hygiene. As his many, many grime-stained children ran around their father, Süleyman watched in horror as the landlord’s hair moved to the rhythm of a million or so blood-sucking nits. It wasn’t a sight that an experienced police officer in his forties, like Süleyman, hadn’t seen before. But it was one that even now turned the stomach of a man who came from a gracious, if impoverished, Ottoman family. As it happened, the landlord had, as he always did, claimed to know nothing about anything. But maybe speaking to someone not in authority, like Adem, was different.

  ‘My landlord reckons the Christians know something,’ Adem said darkly.

  ‘The Christians?’

  Adem tipped his head in the direction of the window behind his chair. ‘Over at the church,’ he said. ‘That Hana, the one he . . . W
ell . . . She was a Christian. Suriani. Every Sunday over at the Virgin Mary church she was. Atoning for her sins, I imagine. But Kaya, so my landlord says, was a Christian too.’

  İzzet Melik rolled his eyes at yet another stupid myth. ‘Kaya isn’t a Christian,’ he said. ‘I think some people round here would like to think he’s different from them. But he’s a Muslim.’

  ‘Yes, but my landlord says that the Christians at the church—’

  ‘Kaya comes originally from Mardin, which is a city with a considerable Christian population,’ Süleyman said. ‘But he himself is not one of them. As you say, his unfortunate victim was, and you may remember that many people, including myself, attended Hana Karim’s funeral service at the Virgin Mary church. The clergy over there know little of Kaya.’

  Adem shrugged. ‘I’m just going on what my landlord said.’

  İzzet Melik turned his heavily mustachioed face towards his boss and shook his head. There was no point in continuing the conversation with Adem. He obviously had some sort of fixation, whether in reality taken from his landlord or not, that Yusuf Kaya was a Christian. Anything more about the escapee he claimed not to know.

  Once outside the rotten and peeling apartment building, both İzzet Melik and Mehmet Süleyman lit up cigarettes.

  ‘What do you think, Inspector?’ İzzet said as he looked down the litter-strewn street, through the tall line of dilapidated nineteenth-century apartment buildings. The church, to the left of where the men were standing, was the only building in the whole quarter that looked cared for.

  Süleyman sighed. ‘I don’t think Kaya came back here,’ he said. ‘Why would he? His old henchmen are either long gone or dead. I think he’s probably abroad by now.’

  ‘The people who sprang him were certainly professional,’ İzzet Melik said.

  ‘Absolutely. To kill three officers and effectively disable, probably permanently, a fourth takes some doing.’ He looked around at the hot, filthy street with distaste, and then added, ‘You don’t find people like that in Tarlabaşı. Or rather’ – he smiled – ‘I don’t think you do.’